Vernon Smith: Discovery gives learning that touch of magic

In my early childhood years, I came to think of libraries as places that surely contained all that was known, and I aspired to go to college because – I believed – that is where one learns all there is to know.

Nothing, I naively thought, was unknowable. One had only to seek knowledge. But, as I gradually learned, the action – all the learning and understanding – occurs in the pursuit of knowledge. The questions actually multiply faster than the answers, and that is the charm of education as a search process.

Fantasy is also important to a child. Dreams are fashioned of fantasy, and out of dreams come the desire for adventure, the desire to learn, and ultimately the realization that learning to learn is what is important. In dreams and fantasy nothing is unattainable – and this is not only a model for seeking, overcoming, and coming to know, but also – and most important – a model for living.

It seems that this conception of the role of fantasy for a child was quite unpopular with the constructivist psychologists of the 1950s and '60s, until it was thoughtfully reconsidered in works such as Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses of Enchantment." It's fortunate that these modern educational fads sometimes tend to be short-lived.

What has endured from my early school years are memories of pleasure and excitement in learning, a search-and-discovery process that was intrinsically rewarding. But that process was increasingly compromised by the growth of performance testing in the schools. By the high school years, "learning" had become less important in proportion to scores on achievement tests.

For example, in those tests you would read several utterly boring paragraphs of text, and then answer a bunch of questions that would measure your comprehension of the text. What I remember is how little of it was worth remembering. This continued in college, except that now the text was sometimes a bit more memorable. Also, the math and physics problems carried some intrinsic joy in the process of discovering solutions.

Graduate school classes, with some significant exceptions, were often a grand continuation of education as memory testing. Only the technical level changed; not the procedures. I'm reminded of the joke told by 2007 Nobel laureate Leo Hurwicz many years ago: "What's the difference between an undergraduate and a graduate student? In an undergraduate class, the professor enters the room and says 'good morning.' The class responds by saying 'Good morning.' In a graduate class, the professor says 'good morning' and the students all write it down."

Over the decades I have come to appreciate that where there is no magic, there is little, if any, learning. What is important is not what you know, but what you can do with what you know that brings magic to your personal experience of inquiry. What is magical about research is the discovery it engenders. There is that pleasurable rush of feeling when the first results of a new experiment come in and you have started to learn something that no one else yet knows.

Then you realize that this is also what meaningful teaching must be about: discovering, along with your students, things that you did not know before: making the unknown known; realizing that most of the action and the excitement is in the chase, and in the new questions that emerge along with the answers. Your learning is revealed in the fact that the new questions could not have been asked before. Libraries and your computer may record much of this activity, but most of it we learn from watching and interacting with others and by practicing an art, whether it is literature, economics, anthropology or physics.

All of this was captured neatly by Benjamin Franklin, so I want to close with one of his gems.

Tell me and I will forget

Teach me and I will remember

Involve me and I will learn

Whether you are a teacher, a student or a reader who loves to learn, may the discovery of truth be ever your pursuit, and may you take joy in the process.

Vernon Smith, a 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economic Science, is a professor of economics and law at Chapman University.